I just finished rereading The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon. It is supposedly a sociological study of the Nazi death camps by Holocaust survivors. The author was an inmate at Buchenwald for a few years where he worked as an assistant to the SS medical officer. He reports that the SS planned three times to send him to Auschwitz to be gassed but the trips were postponed each time. He was liberated in 1945 by the Allies. Most of the book is his account of what was going on at Buchenwald. But there are also many short testimonies or should I say anonymous horror stories from survivors of other camps. This is not really a sociological study and there is no attempt to verify what Kogon did not witness himself. It is more a Rumpelstiltskin-like fit as you would expect from a book with an inflamatory title. I read the prefatory material and the introduction and skimmed the rest of the book–which I first read in 1966. Included in the prefatory material is a page by Reinhold Niebuhr comparing life in the death camps as the nearest thing to hell on earth. I also recently have read Night by Elie Wiesel and From Death Camp to Existentialism by Victor Frank. They both describe the camps they stayed in as having at least some little hope. Hell is a place with no hope. These two books are very much worth reading. The Theory and Practice of Hell is a piece of junk.
Concentration camps as hell
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